A Bird in the Hand...

It’s still dark at 5:30 a.m. While that fact is not astonishing to many, for those who generally don’t rise before lunchtime, waking and stepping into near blackness is a little unexpected.

But Wayne Schacher, habitat restoration manager for Seven Islands Wildlife Refuge, is well aware of what time the sun rises — for the last four years Schacher has spent numerous mornings organizing mist-netting and bird banding sessions on the refuge.

Bird banding begins early. Around a dozen volunteers usually arrive at Seven Islands a little before 5:30 a.m. They untangle and unroll 12 mist-nets (each is 12 meters long and 3 meters tall) by 6 a.m. and leave them open for five hours, or until it becomes too hot, windy or rainy. (In those cases, they re-roll the nets prematurely, as extreme weather creates additional stress for the netted birds.) The volunteers make “net runs” every 40 minutes, extracting birds from the nets and then toting them in soft, cloth bags to a central location so that Mark Armstrong, chief bird bander, can retrieve data about them, band them if they haven’t been previously banded and then release them.

Bird banding at Seven Islands follows the Monitoring Avian Productivity and Survivorship protocol, a meticulous method of measuring and recording data for more than 100 species of birds that is collected, put into a national database and used to analyze population increases or decreases and the factors contributing to the numbers. Created by the Institute for Bird Populations in 1989, MAPS now has more than 500 banding stations across the United States. Everything, from the number of nets to the number of hours the nets are left open, to the days banding can occur, is specified by MAPS, Schacher says.  

Seven Islands Wildlife Refuge, in East Knox County, is under the jurisdiction of Knox County Parks and Recreation but was donated and is still largely funded by the Seven Islands Foundation land conservancy. The entire property covers around 400 acres, about 325 of which are open fields. The refuge is open to the public seven days a week for hiking and observation. Activities that could damage the habitats — horseback riding, mountain biking, camping and usage of motor vehicles like ATVs — are prohibited.

When Schacher first came to work for the foundation in 2001, most of the open fields were planted with fescue grass and he spent the last several years re-planting them with native grasses. Fescue, a cool-season grass, originated in Europe but is prevalent in East Tennessee because of its usefulness as livestock pasture and hay. However, fescue is not a native grass and is a poor natural habitat for many species of birds as it grows densely at its base, not leaving enough room for nesting. The native, warm-season grasses — big bluestem, little bluestem, indiangrass, switchgrass and eastern gamagrass — grow in clumps and provide a canopy that shelters avian species from predators.

“On a global basis, grass birds are in slow decline,” Schacher says. “This area lent itself to doing the grassland restoration work.”

Though researchers aren’t certain of the exact reason for the global population decrease, on a continental basis, Schacher says the decrease is primarily due to the loss of native grassland habitats. Since the new grasses were planted, Seven Islands has monitored the effect on the bird population.

According to Schacher, once banding began at Seven Islands, it was immediately one of the more productive MAPS sites. An estimated 3,000 birds have been tagged in the last four years, and though the Tremont banding site in the Great Smoky Mountains often averages seven or eight birds per netting session, Seven Islands has topped 100 in a day. The first few years birds were only banded in the spring and summer, but now Schacher estimates the volunteers work 40 Sundays a year.

“One of the things [Seven Islands Foundation] asked me to do is to incorporate as much research and demonstration as possible. This is just one of the research projects we have going on there. It doesn’t make sense to do the grassland research unless you can gauge the impact on the species,” Schacher says.